story beginning Archives - Randall Floyd

This one thing will help you finish your story

randallcfloyd — Wed, 22 May 2019 22:24:47 +0000

I was lost. Completely and utterly. It was dark and late, and I desperately needed some rest. But I couldn't rest. I blinked the sleep away as I stared at my computer screen. I had been staring at the same line of text for the past 45 minutes. But I was still lost.

Sure, I was in my home office, I had a warm fire, and I was not uncomfortable in any way, other than the needing-sleep feeling that was nagging at me.I wanted to yell in frustration. I wanted to pound my fist into something ... but the only option I had was my really expensive laptop.

At length, I decided I wasn't going to make any more progress - since I'd already been making so much progress before. So, I admitted defeat. I didn't know what else to do. It was 2:30 in the morning, and I had a meeting with a client a meager 6 hours in the future.

If only I had one thing figured out - something that would have saved me hours of staring and allowed me to move on with my life ... I mean my story.

What was that one thing?

It was a sentence. Something, that I should have done when I started my story but neglected to do because I was too excited to start. I couldn't be bothered with things like planning.

What a waste of time.

But I learned my lesson. Now all of my stories have this sentence written before I start. All of my kiddos' stories have this sentence written too. It's a sentence that can have as much or as little detail as you'd like.

You want to know what it is?

The Ending.

That's it. You need to write a sentence that tells you how your story is going to end.

Simple.

Now, how is your story going to end?

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The First Element of Story Telling – the Inciting Incident

randallcfloyd — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 09:00:05 +0000

The inciting incident has several names, such as the initial conflict, the exposition, the beginning hook, among other things. What you call it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that your scene, your sequence, your act, and your book have one.

The inciting incident is the thing that gets your chapter going. You can think of it as the problem at the beginning of a scene that gets things going. It can come in many different shapes, sizes, and intensities.

You can even think of the inciting incident as a mini-event.

So, in order to give you an idea of what an inciting incident is, I’m going to break down the first chapter of one of my all-time favorite books.

The book is called “The Son of Neptune,” by Rick Riordan. The book is pure gold, and it’s chalk full of great examples of great writing.

The inciting incident in the first chapter of this book is really easy to identify. In typical Rick Riordan fashion, he throws you right into the action. The scene starts off with the hero trying to escape from two gorgons (Medusa’s sisters), and he can’t kill them. However, you quickly find out that they want to kill him.

It’s a great start, and the details Rick Riordan give you to make this particular chase scene more interesting are great.

The protagonist can’t remember anything about his past except for the name of a girl. He’s trying to find something, but he’s not exactly sure what that thing is. And, apparently, he can’t be killed either.

It’s quite the setup, and all of these things end up with huge payoffs later on in the story.

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